Black and grey botanical tattoo of overlapping leaves with fine vein linework across a forearm.

Leaf vein design on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm bears a black and grey tattoo of overlapping leaves, with a central midrib and fine branching veins drawn in dark linework. Soft grey shading fills the leaf shapes, giving them depth. The arm fills the frame against a dark fabric background, with the tattoo centred and the lighting slightly bright on the right side.

Botanical Forearm Leaf Leaves Vein Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got under the awning again, so the pressed leaves on my trestle table had gone soft at the edges and I was peeling them off the cloth one at a time with a butter knife. Saturday at the covered market in Hebden is slow when it rains. People come for the cheese and the bread and stay for the dry things, and mostly they want something to put in a frame and forget about.

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Dad drew leaves for a seed merchant in Halifax for thirty-one years. He never let me start with the outline. You lay the midrib down first, firm and dark, like the spine of something, then the side veins peeling off it at an angle, then the smaller veins splitting again until they thin to hairs. The outline comes last, almost as an afterthought, because the veins are what hold the leaf together. He said water goes where the veins go, so you had better draw them right.

A man in a wax jacket stopped at the stall just before closing and asked whether I had anything from a sycamore. I had one left, curled at the tip, brown at the margins but the veins still sharp. I laid it on the cloth and the rain came in sideways under the awning and beaded along every line of it, running out to the edges exactly the way Dad had shown me on the back of a seed packet thirty years ago. The man bought it without haggling. I stood there folding the cloth and watching the last drops find their way down the leaf and off the tip, which was the whole of what he ever taught me.